Soft launch: Soldier biographies and research notes vary in completeness. Prefer class-roster, NARA, newspapers, and other cited sources for contested facts — treat Research notes as leads, not settled history. Anyone can correct a page; contact us with questions.
Patrol
This page is for administrators and trusted editors who watch the open wiki. Most of the roster is historical; the main risk is spam, blanking, and unsourced invention — not living-person privacy.
Daily habit
- Open Special:RecentChanges (sidebar link, or bookmark it)
- Skim new edits and new accounts
- Open anything that looks wrong: mass blanking, gibberish, promotional links, or large unexplained removals of research notes
- Prefer rollback for obvious vandalism; use undo for a single bad revision you want to reverse carefully
Rollback and undo
- Rollback (administrators): one click restores the last good version by undoing a user’s consecutive bad edits on that page. Use it for clear vandalism.
- Undo: reverses one revision and lets you leave an edit summary. Use when the page has mixed good and bad edits.
- Always leave a short summary (“revert spam”, “restore roster fields”) so the next patrol editor knows why.
Blocks
Block a user or IP when they keep vandalizing after a warning, or when the edit is clearly automated spam.
- Prefer a short first block (hours or a day) unless the pattern is obvious spam
- Block the account; block the IP only if abuse continues while logged out
- Leave a block reason others can understand
- Do not block people for good-faith mistakes — correct the page and leave a Talk note instead
Protect pages
Protect a page only when it is under repeated attack and rollback is not enough. Prefer semi-protection (registered accounts) over full lock. Unlock when the wave stops.
Uploads
Anonymous users cannot upload. If a logged-in account floods junk files:
- Delete the files
- Block the uploader
- Check Special:Log/upload for related uploads
Sources and confidence
- Yellow Record status: unconfirmed banners mean class-roster match confidence is not high — do not treat those class fields as settled
- Research notes may be wrong; prefer a sourced sentence over silent deletion unless the note is spam
- Contested facts belong on the article Talk page until a source is added
- Inline
{{Needs source}}marks a claim that still needs a citation
Useful special pages
- Special:RecentChanges
- Special:NewPages
- Special:Log
- Special:BlockList
- Special:ListUsers
- Special:UnwatchedPages (if watching is in use)
See also
- Contribute — public editing help
- About the data — what the import contains and how to read confidence
- Disclaimer — class-roster and Museum reproduction notes